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Last update:

$Date: 2014/07/21 08:07:41 $

History

Description

This Longmen Dong (Dragon's Gate Cave) is an exceptional cave, but not
the famous cave with the same name which is listed in the UNESCO World Heritage
list.
The other caves are a series of mostly artificial grottoes in Henan, which are
famous Buddhist temples with paintings and sculpures.
This cave is a karst cave which is developed as a show cave.
The special thing with Longmen Dong is that the surrounding rock is
conglomerate.

This is the longest known, mapped and explored conglomerate cave in China.
It has a length of more than 13 kilometers, which makes it the 7th longest
caves of China, but it covers only an area of 1.33 by 1.75 kilometers.
This means it is a typical labyrinthical cave system, with a number of loops.
An although the total vertical range is 356m, which makes it the 13th deepest
cave of China, there is no shaft or drop and the whole cave is explored entirely
without ropes or ladders.
The huge cave system is still not completely explored or surveyed, and it may
become even bigger.

The show cave uses the bigger one of the two known cave entrances.
The cave is rather young, many parts are still very active, with 4,338m of
stream passage, 37 inlets, and four major streamways.
There are only a few small speleothems.
The typical character of the cave are narrow gorges with typical conglomerate
surfaces, round boulders fixed in a fine cement, looking similar to concrete.
Being not one of the common dripstone caves, this cave is even more interesting
although not as popular as those.